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Andrew Pickering is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science and Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics and the editor of Science as Practice and Culture.

Keith Guzik is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, New Jersey.

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"Andrew Pickering is a major figure in the field of science studies. In the original, widely cited and widely admired but still controversial "The Mangle of Practice," he developed a number of important concepts that are strongly resonant for many members of the current generation of scholars, researchers, and theorists in the social sciences and humanities. This new, very substantial, highly readable collection will be illuminating for readers interested in science studies, post-humanist approaches to ethical-pragmatic issues, and/or new directions in ontology."--Barbara Herrnstein Smith, author of "Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human
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The Mangle in Practice

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface ANDREW PICKERING...................................................................................................................................VIINew Ontologies ANDREW PICKERING............................................................................................................................1A Choreography of Fire: A Posthumanist Account of Australians and Eucalypts ADRIAN FRANKLIN...............................................................17Crate and Mangle: Questions of Agency in Confinement Livestock Facilities DAWN COPPIN.....................................................................46Soul Collectors: A Meditation on Arresting Domestic Violence KEITH GUZIK..................................................................................67Resisting and Accommodating Thomas Sargent: Putting Rational Expectations Economics through the Mangle of Practice ESTHER-MIRJAM SENT.....................92The Mangle of Practice and the Practice of Chinese Medicine: A Case Study from Nineteenth-Century China VOLKER SCHEID......................................110Marup Church and the Politics of Hybridization: On Choice and Becoming CASPER BRUUN JENSEN AND RANDI MARKUSSEN............................................129Going with the Flow: Living the Mangle through Environmental Management Practice LISA ASPLEN..............................................................163A Manglish Way of Working: Agile Software Development BRIAN MARICK........................................................................................185The Docile Body of the Scientist YIANNIS KOUTALOS..........................................................................................................202The Mangle of Practice or the Empire of Signs: Toward a Dialogue between Science Studies and Soviet Semiotics MAXIM WALDSTEIN.............................221Ontological Dance: A Dialogue between Heidegger and Pickering CAROL J. STEINER............................................................................243References.................................................................................................................................................267About the Contributors.....................................................................................................................................293Index......................................................................................................................................................297

Chapter One

A Posthumanist Account of Australians and Eucalypts

ADRIAN FRANKLIN

In this chapter I ask whether there is anything to be gained by taking seriously a posthumanist analysis of the relationship between humanity and the natural world, one that in fact extinguishes dualism and produces only naturecultures (Haraway 2003b, 5). I will examine this question through an analysis of the relationship between eucalyptus (gum) trees and Australia. Most humanist accounts, such as those developed in "traditional" social anthropology and sociology, privilege the activity, agency, and representations of humans, and in so doing render the natural world and its individual species as passive and of interest only insofar as they provide a palette of meanings for essentially human symbolism, dreamings, imaginaries (see Rival 1998; Douglas 1975, 1996). Such an approach has an impeccable track record ranging from Emile Durkheim to Mary Douglas, and it is not one I want to challenge here per se. What I do want to challenge is the implicit assumption that this approach is all there is to the relationship between nature and humanity, or all we can say about it. Rather than only inquire about the meaning of nature (or gum trees in this case), I also want to inquire about what it is they do, and, importantly, what implications those actions have for the world, themselves, humans, and "the social."

Following Andrew Pickering's advice in The Mangle of Practice (1995) that we place ourselves in the action-in medias res or "in the thick of things" where the play or dance of agency takes place-my analysis never assumes that eucalyptus trees and humans exist in separate worlds but rather that what happens to both is emergent and co-constitutive. If we allow that gum trees are neither purely natural nor purely social but both (what we might call a relational entity, after John Law [1994, 1999]), then what does this say about environmental discourses that endorse and seek to reproduce (or restore) so-called primordial natures in light of the claim by Tim Low (2003) for a New Nature (in Australia)? In this chapter I suggest that wilderness and environmental policy in general need to be mangled. I also support those who argue that agency needs to be understood always as an artifact of time-of social, ecological, and glacial times (Macnaghten and Urry 1998; Jones and Cloke 2002).

As Stephen Pyne notes, "Eucalyptus is not only the Universal Australian, it is the ideal Australian-versatile, tough, sardonic, contrary, self-mocking, with a deceptive complexity amid the appearance of massive homogeneity; an occupier of disturbed environments; a fire creature" (1992, 25). Here Pyne is using gum trees as representations of Australia. This notion, along with similar material from art, literature, and the media, provide considerable mileage for the sociology of Australian nature. For example, narratives about gum trees tell us a great deal about Australian processes of nation formation; it was against the gum tree that a viable Australia was wrought (the motif of the so-called Heidelberg school of art is "the now relaxed" pioneer with his axe [see Allen 1997]); it was with the gum tree and against the oak and the plane tree that a distinctive modern Australia was asserted (introduced species were to be chased out while natives were to be embraced, and enthusiastically planted); and it was under and for gum forests that an econationalism was forged against global capitalism (gum trees hereby enter a final phase as sacred intensities of Australianness with its back against the wall). How they have changed as objects in the Australian imaginary makes perfect sociological material by describing so well the colonial and postcolonial connection between an emerging Australia and its totemic nature. But Pyne is surely also being ironic: How can we be so much like a tree and yet remain so unlike one-so outstandingly human against the woodenness of a mere tree? Pyne is not making much of a humanist point, but the point is the humanism of the writing slips in with little or no thought required. After its human representations there is little or no sociological content left to a gum tree. Or is there?

Pickering (2000) reminds us of C. P. Snow's description of the "two cultures" of the humanists and the scientists of British society in the 1950s and the yawning gap they produced. But whereas in the 1950s the two cultures barely knew about each other and had little need to do so, in recent years this congenial polarity is short-circuited by inconvenient new phenomena, such as biopolitics, environment, and natureculture. Where does the science of biopolitics end and the humanity begin? Similarly, what is a "proper" nature, or a "proper" environment? Who can tell us, science or the humanities? What is the expertise we need to have...